HTML5 Achieves Some Real Momentum

In an ideal world, every organization would have the resources needed to write and support an application running natively on every mobile computing device. However, because such a world doesn’t exist, it’s only natural that we’re beginning to see a mass adoption of the HTML5 markup language across the mobile computing spectrum.

Despite some widely misinterpreted comments concerning HTML5 made recently by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, a new survey of 4,000 developers conducted by the Kendo UI division of Telerik, a provider of application development frameworks, finds that HTML5 is finally seeing mainstream adoption. A full 63 percent of them are developing applications using HTML5 today, and 94 percent of them will be using it by the end of the year.

While HTML5 has been criticized for forcing developers to sacrifice controls that are unique to any given mobile computing platform, open source projects such as Apache Cordova have helped developers work around those limitations. The fact is, says Todd Anglin, chief evangelist for Telerik, that unlike large companies such as Facebook, which can afford to develop native applications for every mobile computing platform, the vast majority of organizations can’t afford to take on that gargantuan of a challenge. HTML5 allows organizations to support a broad swath of mobile computing applications in a way that allows them to utilize expertise and code across those platforms.

As is the case with any application development project, time and money are in short supply. The demand for mobile computing applications is particularly acute because businesses of all sizes have fallen in love with everything from the Apple iPad to the latest Surface offerings from Microsoft. In a world where no one can be sure what the next great trend in mobile computing is actually going to be, HTML5 provides a much-needed higher level of abstraction that at the very least limits compatibility concerns to the browser rather than the underlying hardware.